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Sitting in my 6-tatami room in the Daiya Ryokan in Kyoto. For the uninitiated, a tatami is a small woven mat; kind of like a rug made out of straw. You cover the floor with tatami panels which are about 3 feet by 6 feet, and however many you can fit in the room, that's how big it is. Most rooms are made purposefully to dimensions that allow maximum tatami coverage.

Tatami is slightly soft and comfortable to walk on (with slippers of course; the straw in them tends to splinter off and get stuck in socks, and you would never wear shoes on them), but also less dusty and easier to clean than carpet. Unfortunately, in the states one tatami square of decent quality is going to run you around $500-$800 (if the prices at Mitsuwa are to be believed), so to fill even a modest room such as this one with tatami can be an expensive proposition. This entire Ryokan (japanese style inn 旅館) is filled with them; I haven't counted, but there are probably around 60 in all (8 similar sized rooms plus hallways).

I've noticed that elementary school children (shougakusei; 小学生) are for the most part afraid of foreigners, but that the brave ones (or the ones who are dared by their friends or assigned something in english by their teachers) will shout english greetings at you from afar or even approach you and talk to you. One group of kids in Kamakura came up to me and my brother and asked us to "sign" (japanese people use this word for 'autograph'; compare the length and complexity of the words and it's obvious why).

As is always the case with these kids, they know about 5 words of english, so they approach you with their canned english question and then busily speak amongst themselves in Japanese. A group from Osaka who were at Nara shouted "Hello!" to a passing foreigner; he said "Hello! How are you?" cheerfully as he walked by, and they looked at eachother and said the Japanese equivalent of "What the hell did that mean?!" When you answer a question like that, they are very shocked. Another girl approached us outside of Nijo castle and started reading form her english book some assignment; talk to a foreigner, ask them questions, record their answers, that kind of thing. She was speaking really quietly and was burrying her (embarassed) face in the book, so I told her to speak louder and look at me and she screamed, said "You can speak!", and ran back to her friends.

The group in Kamakura ended up asking us where we were from, how I knew Japanese, how long I have been studying, etc. We had their books and their pencils so I guess they couldn't run away. While we were doing this, another group came up and jokingly asked me how to get to kamakura station (we were about 8 or 9 blocks away). Any language student will probably tell you that answering simple questions about yourself, telling time, counting things, and giving and receiving directions are the first and most fundamental things you learn. So I handled all of this quite adeptly; it's been a year since I learned how to do these things in Japanese and I've gotten decent at pulling it out quickly. The kids who had come up to me kinda stared in shock, said thank you, and ran away laughing saying "no way!"

This is the lowest of the low communication you need to function in a society. Not in a country; gestures and a severely broken patois of english and local language (or even just english) have served me well basically everywhere I've gone. But this trip was somewhat different in nature. I've studied Japanese since I got back from my last trip here (I started classes about 20 days after my return), and I've more or less kept with it since then. A lot of the stuff we learned felt like it was special case type stuff that is nice to do in class but would be useless for understanding any "real" speech. In a lot of ways, that's right; but the ammount I am able to express in Japanese (with oft broken tense, verb form, or even verb!) has been quite surprising to me. I was able to talk to those kids, hold a 3 hour conversation at my favorite yakitori place, make bullet train (called the 'shinkansen' here; 新幹線, or 'new trunk line') ticket reservations to and from Kyoto and Nikko, and prepare a stay at a Ryokan where the two old woman proprietors don't know any english.

If these sound like things that would be covered almost exactly by a language text book, that's because they are. But they (and the reading I am able to do) are an important and exciting first step. I was admiring the gate from afar before, and I've walked up to it and opened it. Walking through is the rough part, but at least I'm at the stage where I know what it entails.